Saturday, July 21, 2007

Blackout!

Until last Thursday, it hadn't rained here in two weeks. Almost every day, the Weather Channel would forecast rain, but no rain would come. It would come north of us or south of us, but not ON us. If you don't have a sprinkler system around here, your lawn is brown right now.

Finally, last Wednesday, the forecast for Thursday was 80% chance of rain! It HAD to come now, right?

Thursday morning, no rain.

Thursday after lunch, no rain.

I checked the Weather Channel again. No rain in the forecast. What? Where did that 80% go? I realized I could hold out on my poor plants no longer and gave them a good soaking.

About an hour after I got done watering my plants, FOOM!! Out of nowhere, this ferocious storm blew up from the north east, an entirely wrong direction for weather around here. Wind blowing like crazy, rain coming in sideways. We lost a big limb in the backyard, and the huge oak tree next to the house was thrashing back and forth so hard that I banned the kids from kitchen, lest it should crash down upon us. It was like this Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Then the clouds parted, the sun came out and it was beautiful the rest of the day and ever since.

Oh yes. And we lost power. We have a well, so no power = no well pump = no running water. Edison estimated the power would be back on by 1 a.m. Not too bad, considering they also estimated 50,000 to 60,000 homes lost power. We used baby wipes on our hands, brushed our teeth with bottled water and didn't flush (ew). I took a chair outside and knit until the sun went down.

Friday morning we woke up still without electricity. Hubs brought up a bucket of lake water so we could flush. The kids ate dry cereal for breakfast. We took our unwashed selves up to the library for movie day (yay!), where I knit through Stuart Little 1 & 2. (Read the book, kids!) When we got home the power was back on. We were out for just short of 24 hours.

I haven't heard the official synopsis, but there are rumors of a tornado south of us. Our neighborhood has many, many huge oak trees down, as well as large limbs. There are still people in our county without power, 48 hours and counting. I feel for them. The only plus is that it hasn't been hot out.